The discovery was made by Tom Greer (tng*) of the United States using an Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2620 v3 CPU @ 2.40GHz with 16GB RAM, running Microsoft Windows 10. This computer took about 3 hours 45 minutes to complete the primality test using multithreaded LLR. Tom is a member of the Sicituradastra. team.

The prime was verified on 4 April 2018, 00:17:20 UTC by Gary Bauer (GDB) of the United States using an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz with 16GB RAM, running Microsoft Windows 10. This computer took about 2 hours 25 minutes to complete the primality test using multithreaded LLR.

Don't worry, I just made a joke because we had no new mega prime almost for two months )

By a large margin we're finding more mega primes this year than ever before. We found 4 mega primes in one day earlier this week. 47 have been found so far this year, and it's still May. The record for a full year is 61.

What's different is we're no longer doing the big flashy announcements for all mega primes. The bar has been raised and only primes that make it into the top 100 known primes get announcements. People were complaining that there were too many announcements. It was getting routine and tedious, for us as well as them.

In 2018, therefore, we have lots more mega primes and a lot fewer announcements.
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